I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. [...] I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which [civilization] works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

On the other hand, as accurate as this turned out to be, I didn't notice any grand utopias coming from the post-Butlerian Jihad, either.

In the future, it's unsettlingly possible we're going to need all the machine intelligence we can get. Either to solve the problems of our own making or to compete against those that have embraced them.

Choice quote:If Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear. This is roughly equivalent to the output of ten coal-fired power plants, emitting 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.

https://czep.net/17/legion-of-lobotomized-unices.html hits a note with me. I was the sysadmin of one in the last era of the unix-as-social-pod servers (circa 1998-2002). I, too, am nostalgic, but it was hard to argue when all my user-friends left for livejournal and myspace.